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Telework may be popular and increased participation targets admirable - but do we really need the NBN to make it work? Not necessarily.

The promise of telework has made it a natural sales hook for a government desperate to reinforce the value of its $37.4b national broadband network (NBN). Yet with telework already entirely possible and being regularly practiced using existing technologies, is the NBN really the key enabler for telework - or are there entirely other issues stopping the broader adoption of telework in Australia?
The government has already invested heavily in case studies showing the proven benefits of telework, and its role in engaging with disempowered parts of the community.

Stephen Conroy, unsurprisingly, was spruiking the NBN's role at the National Telework Week launch event: "Infrastructure is a lottery," he said, "if you've got to pray and ask 'oh my goodness, how close do I live to the exchange or cabinet, and see if I'm within 400m of a fibre cabinet so I can get these fabled speeds on [the Coalition's] FttN, or if I'm further away so reliability become an issue."

"You can have all the great culture change and plans in the world, but if people don't have the infrastructure for this paradigm we're designing, that's where we find issues."

But is the case for NBN-enabled telework so clear-cut, as the government made out by entitling its report Creating Jobs Through NBN-Enabled Telework. In fact, despite including the NBN in the title, that very same report suggests that the lack of suitable technology is actually far from the main reason more Australians aren't teleworking.

Survey results make this entirely clear: when research firms Deloitte Access Economics and Colmar Brunton asked people who didn't want to telework, why they didn't want to telework, almost none named the lack of technology, or bad Internet service, as the reason.

Asked to assume the NBN had been rolled out, just 5% of regional respondents - and 3% of those with family commitments, and 4% of disabled respondents - said their opposition stemmed from their belief that the NBN will not be available in their area, or that it won't make a difference. Only 4% of regional respondents (2% with family commitments, 7% disabled) said they lacked a computer or internet connection. And just 2% of mature workers and 1% of part-timers named the lack of a computer or internet connection as a disadvantage of telework.

The NBN, nor any other type of ICT-related consideration, didn't even rate on the list of reasons unemployed workers weren't working; family commitments, training issues, disabilities and other socially-related reasons dominated. Similarly, the NBN and other ICT issues didn't rate when current non-working respondents were asked what would get them back into the workforce. Instead, issues like childcare, training, job suitability for telework, and other socially-related issues dominated.

Even amongst respondents living in regional areas, communications issues barely rated a mention. Just 1% of regional respondents and 1% of disabled respondents named Internet access or computer issues as a disadvantage of telework.

Further suggesting that the NBN is relatively low relevance to telework in workers' minds, just 7% of full-time workers, 9% of part-time workers and 3% of unemployed workers said they would want information about the NBN to decide whether they would take up telework. It seems workers care about the NBN far less than the government does.

The bigger obstacle

Taken together, these figures suggest a conclusion that may be uncomfortable for the government: that few Australians actually see the lack of the NBN as an obstacle to telework.

Close examination of the survey's methodology shows that the respondents were repeatedly asked about the value of NBN-enabled telework as though it were a given that the two go together. However, there is a great incongruity between these figures, and other results suggesting 62% of workers would take up telework if it were available to them.

In other words, workers are quite keen on telework but lack of technology and Internet access barely rated a blip on the radar of reasons why they couldn't do it. Indeed, it is statistically remote to suggest that many of the 31% of workers reporting they already have formal or ad hoc telework arrangements in place with their employers, are doing so over NBN services. Rather, they are perfectly able to telework using existing communications technologies.

This is not to say that the NBN does not make telework better: this would seem a foregone conclusion, since greater and more reliable bandwidth makes telework mainstays like videoconferencing work better than ever. Indeed, a survey of current teleworkers at six existing organisations - Telework, Productivity and Wellbeing, conducted by the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (IBES) - contained extensive anecdotal evidence about the improvements that NBN access would provide.

"With the current IT you can do the job OK," said a respondent from an unnamed financial-services company. "But we need something more, definitely Skype or video conferencing. Video conferencing would be fantastic. Now we are using only dial-up so we can call only one person."

The survey's government participant, from an unnamed local council, said the big problem was that use of new technologies was restricted by internal technology policy. "What I haven't got is visual access," the respondent said.

"Videoconferencing is expensive still, unless you use Skype, and [the organisation] hasn't advanced to that yet, even though the technology is there. Whatever goes on my laptop has to be put on by the IT department, it has to be consistent and they have to be able to support it."

Both come from organisations where telework is already well entrenched, so clearly the lack of NBN services has not been a hindrance for them. And while both respondents would certainly like to have NBN-grade services, whether they need them or not seems to be an entirely different question.

Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australian Industry Group (Ai Group), elaborated on this disparity quite effectively in his speech at the launch of National Telework Week. The big obstacle to telework, he said, is not that the technology doesn't exist to support it - it's that businesses, especially those outside of IT, are still reluctant to let employees use them to work outside of the office.

"Our research indicates that many of these businesses don't even understand the term 'telework'," Willox explained, "and consequently they are liable to dismiss telework as something that is not for them."

"Further," he continued, "they may be less open to exploring the potential of telework because of this mindset. A concerted effort will be required to familiarise companies with the term, and to educate them about the benefits of telework. Unlike companies in the IT sector, businesses in other sectors often do not have an appreciation of the technologies on hand to assist with telework."

The issue is not entirely divorced from the NBN, Willox pointed out: only 55% of businesses in the Ai Group's own surveys said they have the skills and capabilities to take advantage of the NBN.

Yet with even the fundamentals of telework still lacking in most businesses, Willox said the keys to success are far more prosaic: "A genuine desire to improve workplace productivity is a foundation of any successful flexible work strategy," he said, noting that this desire should initially translate into development of a telework business case; embedding telework into the company culture; and the transitioning of staff to the new environment, with the most successful arrangements those negotiated directly between managers and their reports.

The first step can be the hardest, Willox added: "By shifting your focus to key business objectives and asking 'how does my organisation need to work to be more productive - and to what extent are we confining ourselves to certain workplace practices because they've become a habit... that starts businesses to think about how it can and should work for them."

A matter of trust

For government body IP Australia - a mature telework environment with hundreds of staff using the practice to stay in contact from around the country - years of refinement have honed in on the need to delegate responsibilities according to "clearly defined application processes," acting director for employee performance Chris Menadue said.

The quality of broadband at an employee's house had indeed been "a major factor when employees were buying or renting a house from which they intended to telework remotely," Menadue said - but the answer wasn't necessarily that employees needed the NBN.

"To overcome these barriers, we've developed the capability to assess whether an employee's proposed or current residence can access business grade broadband. Our experience with providers now means they deliver much more reliable services. Certainly, the NBN should help address these problems." In other words, Menadue is saying, the NBN is a nice-to-have but it's still more than possible to telework effectively without it. At IP Australia, the key to making telework a success has been the implementation of "better guidelines and clearly defined processes," he said.

If there's one thing the government's NBN report did establish, it's that Australians are keen on the general idea of telework, for a variety of reasons primarily related to their family commitments and physical limitations.

Yet there's no need to wait until the NBN rolls into town to start realising its benefits: employers who are willing to push the old ways aside and make the change, will find many employees are more than willing to try telework and, in many cases, work harder than ever before.

Even the government's survey found that telework could get many more hours' work out of the same employees: part-time workers estimated they could work an extra 3.2 hours per week, on average, if they were formally allowed to work from home.

These expected upticks in productivity are reflected in the government's estimates that NBN-enabled telework could create the equivalent of 25,000 full-time jobs, including 10,000 in regional areas. Yet many of these benefits would also accrue without the NBN, if employers could just get past what seems to be the biggest obstacle to telework: traditional notions of control, and the lack of trust that keeps employers from allowing their workers a greater degree of flexibility.

"I do not believe productivity and telework are something conducted in a black box, independent of the principles of a modern economy," said Bill Shorten, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, and for Financial Services and Superannuation.

With over 1 million Australians currently working in management roles, Shorten said, "the reality is that we are a nation of managers. Telework provides the opportunity to demonstrate people letting go of traditional notions of management control, and best practice shows what can be done."

Management control is important, Shorten agreed - citing "the need to have protocols and a balance of best-practice leadership" - but equally important is embracing telework's role in the future.

"We know what the future looks like," he continued. "We don't know every aspect of it, but if you look at current trends and you believe they are the trends of the future, then we know some of what is coming. The question is, how can we respond to what we can logically see in the next 30 to 40 years? We can use telework, and a debate about productivity, to reconsider what is best in all our workplaces."

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